PHP to SharePoint roadmap

Question

I'm a PHP developer with familiarity with Rails and a focus on MVC development. My company is moving more and more to SharePoint and I feel I need to learn to build application within the SharePoint system.

I have some brief introduction to C# but that's about it. I've used some SharePoint Designer and the web interface but not that heavily (most of my "development" so far for SharePoint has been html/css/javascript page manipulation in SPDesigner).

What, and in what order should I be learning to eventually develop applications for SharePoint? Also, any good resources for each step?

Answer 1

Maybe ProcessMaker could be a starting point? It is a open source BPM system based on PHP and has some basic SharePoint triggers. You could start playing with those and take a look at the code?

Answer 2

SharePoint is so big and complex that you really need to have a specific requirement in mind.

You will find that SharePoint gets in the way a bit if you are used to simple web apps which do only what you write them to do and can be upgraded with a simple file copy. However, there are ways to make it closer to modern web development.

For the last year or so I have been building web parts that look a lot like asp.net mvc controllers. The tools I use are on github - http://github.com/tqc/RazorEngine.

You can do a lot of stuff client side, which is the same regardless of platform. There are even libraries that let you use jquery to read from SharePoint lists, though I generally prefer custom web services myself. I'd stay away from designer for this though - it works well to start with, but eventually becomes Unmaintainable.